My objective is to produce a definitive work on the development of anatomy in Western Europe from the death of Galen until the publication of the Fabrica in 1543. Emphasis will be placed on the transmission of classical anatomical learning to the Latin Middle Ages, and its diffusion throughout Western Europe. Consideration of the interaction of the scientific, technological, medical, political, social, economic and philosophical changes contributing to those processes will be my goal. My history will be interpretive and analytical rather than compendious and encyclopedic. I will endeavour not only to show what happened, but to explain why it happened. As the first of the biological disciplines to develop, anatomy affords a paradigm for the developmental study of all Western science. My work then, while providing a background for the Vesalian revolution, will elucidate problems concerning the nature, causes, and consequences of all scientific and cultural change.